Although A Woman is a Woman was his third feature film, audiences saw it before Le petit soldat, and thus was viewed largely in comparison to Breathless. And the two films couldn’t have been any more different. Whereas Breathless was a black-and-white evocation of old American crime films shot through with an existentialist sense of humor, self-reflexive posturing, and the then-revolutionary use of jump cutting, A Woman is a Woman is a colorful, widescreen poem to that great, dying American genre, the musical comedy. They have in a common a deconstructionist approach to American filmmaking, but after that the two films part ways.

Where Breathless is ultimately a downer, its sly, knowing humor masking an underlying subtext of existentialist dread, A Woman is a Woman is light and cheery, brandishing its bold color scheme and playful use of sound not just to undermine conventional cinematic techniques, but to celebrate the beauty of life. The seemingly opposing words tragedy and comedy are self-consciously evoked throughout the film, but the ultimate message Godard wants to leave us with is the sense that there is little dividing the two.

The story centers on a woman, Angela (Anna Karina, who was soon to become Godard’s wife), a beautiful young striptease artist who aspires to a better life. She decides, quite on the spot, that she wants to have a baby and she wants to have it now. This does not sit very well with her boyfriend, Émile (Jean-Claude Brialy), who has clearly settled comfortably into their relationship and feels that they have all the time in the world. Meanwhile, Émile’s best friend, Alfred (Jean-Paul Belmondo), pines away for Angela, thus setting up a love triangle, one of the structural staples of the musical comedy. (The fact that Alfred’s last name is Lubitsch is an all-too-obvious wink-wink nod to Ernst Lubitsch, the German expatriate Hollywood director who is still the enduring grand master of sophisticated romantic comedies.)

Godard himself described A Woman is a Woman as a “neorealist musical,” which it is and it isn’t. Most of the film was shot on the streets of Paris, thus maintaining the French New Wave’s borrowing from Italian neorealism, an emphasis on location and a disdain for studio-bound sets and their artificial lighting. It is never quite a musical, though; it might be better described as a frustrated musical, one that constantly threatens to break out into full song and dance, but is thwarted again and again. Godard employs a garish orchestral score that swells at all the right times, instilling basic human movements and situations with a sense of urgency and drama they might otherwise lack. Yet, at the same time, he playfully cuts off the score at any given moment, replacing the artificiality of its audience-nudging emotionalism with the gritty location sounds of Parisian streets in the middle of the day.

Yet, it is not the self-reflexive undermining of cinematic expectations that we’re left with at the end of the film. Rather, we walk away with a giddy, unbridled sense of joy. A Woman is a Woman is a film about love by a man who was clearly in love, and its legacy is the sense that Godard could be just as playful and life-affirming in his artistry as he could be political. Godard is celebrated by art film and avant-garde enthusiasts for his unconventionality; Breathless is a masterpiece not because of the story it tells, but because of the way it literally rewrote the possibilities of cinematic language in one bold stroke. A Woman is a Woman can’t make similar claims, but it is certainly one of the most enjoyable and clever films to emerge from the French New Wave.

Copyright ©2004 James Kendrick

All images copyright © The Criterion Collection and Rialto Pictures